Patrick Noone analyses the six balls that clinched the game for India at Old Trafford

Sport is about moments.
The moments that define matches, tournaments, even careers. We talk about ‘big
game players’ who routinely step up and deliver such moments to seize the
initiative, change the course of a match or make the crucial contribution at
the crucial time to turn the game in their team’s favour.

In Jasprit Bumrah, India
have a bowler who produces this kind of moment with such regularity that his
career is starting to resemble a highlights package of match-defining balls,
wickets or spells.

In the penultimate
over of India’s last outing in this World Cup, with Afghanistan needing 21 runs
from 12 balls, Bumrah delivered five perfect yorkers and a low full toss that
cost him just five runs, leaving Afghanistan with too much to do in the final
over.

Today, Bumrah’s killer
blow to West Indies’ hopes of chasing 269 came in the form of a double-wicket maiden
in the 27th over. In truth, the stakes were not as high today in
Manchester as they were on Saturday in Southampton. It was the middle of the
innings and West Indies had already been reduced to 107-5 when Bumrah began the
second over of his second spell.

But in Carlos Brathwaite,
the man who took his side so close to victory on this very ground just five
days ago in a similarly improbable run chase against New Zealand, West Indies had
a man at the crease more than capable of dragging his side back into the
contest.

It was early in
Brathwaite’s innings though and he was yet to get going. He never would. Bumrah
struck with the first ball of the over with a beauty that swung one way and
seamed the other, just enough to tempt Brathwaite to have a nibble at, just enough
to find the edge of his bat, before MS Dhoni was able to stretch just enough to
take the catch behind the stumps.

You have to feel a bit
for Fabian Allen at this stage. Playing in his first World Cup match, walking
to the crease with his team in more than a spot of bother, the partisan India
crowd on their feet and making a cacophonous noise to greet him, he could perhaps
have been forgiven if the occasion got to him. Especially when you consider
what he was having to face from Bumrah, a bowler with his tail up, creating another
seminal moment in front of our eyes.

Allen would only last ball
– at 143kph it was the quickest delivery of Bumrah’s over and it cannoned into
the right-hander’s front pad. The umpire’s finger went up, the crowd noise that
had gone from roar to hubbub was reignited once again. Allen reviewed the
decision, perhaps realising that him surviving was now West Indies’ best chance
of getting over the line, or perhaps genuinely thinking it was going past leg stump.
Not so; Bumrah had been able to straighten it just enough – 0.5° to be precise –
for the verdict to be umpire’s call.

107-5 had become 107-7
in a flash and India were almost home. Kemar Roach was the next man in, the man
to face the hat-trick ball. Roach is a capable batsman, certainly for a number
nine. He played his part in the drama of the New Zealand match on Saturday,
hanging around for 31 balls and 14 runs, but keeping out Bumrah was going to be
a different challenge altogether.

As Bumrah started his
idiosyncratic, stuttering run up, the atmosphere was one of expectancy – almost
certainty – that he would complete the three-card trick. As the ball left Bumrah’s
right hand, and floated out at just 97kph, there was a split second in which
everyone watching expected the batsman to be bamboozled and for the zing bails
to light up.

Bumrah’s slower ball
has been a potent weapon for him ever since he made his international debut in
2016. He has taken 24 wickets with it in all formats, eight of them bowled and,
famously, one LBW when Shaun Marsh was trapped in front during the Boxing Day
Test in Melbourne last year. The hat-trick ball today was even slower than the
Marsh dismissal – 97kph compared to 112kph – but the lines of the two balls were
almost identical.

Roach was equal to it on this occasion though. He got his bat down and defended the hat-trick ball – an inch-perfect yorker that Bumrah could hardly have executed better. It was a delivery more than worthy of dismissing a batsman of greater repute than Roach but, on this occasion, he was able to keep it out and Bumrah was denied his hat-trick. He would see out the rest of the over too, defending twice and ducking once as Bumrah finished off his work for the day – six overs, one maiden, two for nine.

A hat-trick would have been the icing on the cake for Bumrah; the obvious, show-stopping moment, on a level that even he is yet to reach in his astonishingly successful career to date. Perhaps we were denied that moment, but this over was no less thrilling as a result. Sometimes, the best moments are the ones that give you just enough, the ones that leave you wanting just a little bit more.